A final conference thought . . .

I got back about midnight on Friday and met the family to take the grand kids swimming for the weekend. We had a great time.

While at the hotel, I had some time to begin reflecting about the conference and the learning from my week in Vermont. It was a very rewarding experience for me working with quality people and being able to learn directly from Peter Senge whose work has had an influence on me for over a decade. I have a deeper understanding of the principles of systems thinking because of this experience that will change how I work with mental models and ladders of inference.

The bigger change, however, will be around creative tension as I shared in an earlier post. His sharing of this concept introduced me to a new way of thinking about vision, one end of creative tension. He uses the word aspiration to describe what we are trying to achieve or that better place to be. I like that word as a way to explain creative tension. He also reinforced the need to know our current reality as opposed to our assumptions about it. Too often we make decisions based not on the current reality, but on our perceptions of what we want it to be.

Visiting Burlington and experiencing what they are doing around sustainability is also something I will not forget and has me thinking about our schools and the communities that make up our school district. Should and could we be doing something similar? I think it will be important to consider sustainability in our proposed bond measure projects and it makes sense to work with the larger community in making decisions about how green we want to become. I will be sharing my thinking with the board and will be asking them for guidance as we move forward.

Well, tomorrow is back to a "normal" week. I'm looking forward to a less hectic pace while I continue to reflect and bring clarity to my thinking about the future.